This is a study guide through Chronic Grace: Prayers, Saints, and Thorns That Stay, a memoir I wrote about my struggle with Long Covid. It's kind of weird to have a study guide for a memoir, right? And yet here we are, looking cute and darling and holding it in our hands.

The focus of this particular study guide is the part of my book that deals with the mystics and how they prayed. When I was writing Chronic Grace, I was lonely writing all by myself and about myself, so I enlisted the help of some 500-year-old friends to beef things up and keep me company. Wow, did they teach me a lot about praying through my "thorn." They were merry, odd colleagues.

I hope you'll feel the same way when you are done with this guide.

I don't know what your thorn is, but you do. You know why you're holding this guide, why you maybe even read the original book itself. Thorns come in many flavors of bad: health issues, relational impasses, mental anguish. We pray and pray for their resolution, and all we hear is the sound of our own voice in a dark, vast room. This room feels like a hotel conference room, indifferent, our cries swallowed by acres of geometric carpet and movable walls.